Widows

by Ed McBain

  "A quite beautiful piece," Mott said. "She couldn't use it . . . from what I was able to gather, she was renting a furnished apartment . . . but it went in a minute. Well, only seventeen hundred dollars," he said, and raised his eyebrows and moved his hands in an accompanying extravagant gesture.

  "What time did she come in here?" Kling asked. "Last Monday."

  "It was toward noon. Shortly before noon. Sometime between eleven-thirty and twelve o'clock."

  "You remember, huh?" Brown said.

  "Yes. It was about that time." As if on cue, somewhere in the shop a clock began chiming the hour. "A Joseph Knibb," Mott said, almost idly. "Quite rare, quite valuable, such lovely chimes."

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  The clock chimed six times.

  Mott looked at his watch.

  "Well, I guess that's it," Brown said. "Thanks a lot, Mr Mott."

  "Thanks," Kling said.

  The moment they were out on the street again, Brown said, "You think he's gay?"

  "He was wearing a wedding band."

  "I caught it. That doesn't mean anything."

  "What's a butler's table?" Kling asked.

  "I don't know," Brown said, and looked up at the sky. "I hope Carella gets good weather tomorrow," he said.

  Deputy Inspector William Cullen Brady was telling the trainees that he took no credit for organizing the hostage negotiating team. Listening to him, Eileen felt uncomfortable because she thought she was overdressed.

  This was the first meeting of the training class.

  Thursday morning, the nineteenth day of July. Nine o'clock.

  For work she'd normally have worn either slacks or a wide skirt, comfortable shoes, big tote bag - unless they were dolling her up for the street. But she hadn't decked herself out as a decoy since the night she'd killed Robert Wilson. Bobby. She supposed that was known as shirking the work. Not precisely doing the job for which she was getting paid. Which was why she was here today, she guessed. So she could go back to doing an honest job someplace in the department.

  She was wearing a simple suit, brown to complement her red hair and green eyes, tan blouse with a stock tie, sand-colored pantyhose, low-heeled pumps, fake alligator-skin bag. Service revolver in the bag, alongside the lipstick. Overdressed for sure. The only other woman in the room, a tiny brunette with a hard, mean look, was wearing jeans and a white cotton T-shirt. Most of the men were dressed casually, too. Slacks, sports shirts, jeans, only one of them wearing a jacket.

  There were five trainees altogether. Three men, two women. Brady was telling them that the unit had been

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  organized by former chief of patrol Ralph McCleary when he was still a captain some twenty years back. "... never would have been a team," he was saying. "We'd still be breaking down doors and going in with shotguns. His ideas worked then, and they still work. I take credit for only one new concept. I put women on the team. We've already got two women in the field, and I hope to have another two out there ..."

  A nod and a smile to Eileen and the brunette.

  ". . .by the time we finish this training program."

  Brady was in his early fifties, Eileen supposed, a tall, trim man with bright blue eyes and a fringe of white hair circling his otherwise bald head. Nose a bit too prominent for his otherwise small features. Gave his face a cleaving look. He was the only man in the room wearing a tie. Even Dr Goodman, who sat beside him at the desk in front of the classroom, was casually dressed in a plaid sports shirt and dark blue slacks.

  "Before we get started," Brady said, "I'd like to take a minute to introduce all of you. I'll begin here on the left . . . my left, that is ... with Detective/First Grade Anthony . . . am I pronouncing this correctly . . . Anthony Pellegrino?"

  "Yes, sir, that's it, Pellegrino, like the mineral water."

  Short and wiry, with dark curly hair and brown eyes. Badly pockmarked face. Olive complexion. Eileen wondered why Brady had questioned the pronunciation of a simple name like Pellegrino. Especially when it was the brand name of a widely known mineral water. Hadn't Brady ever been to an Italian restaurant? But there were people in this city who got thrown by any name ending in an o, an a, or an i. Maybe Brady was one of them. She hoped not.

  "Detective/First Grade Martha Halsted ..."

  The petite brunette with the Go-to-Hell look. Cupcake breasts, the narrow hips of a boy.

  "Martha's with the Robbery Squad," Brady said.

  Figures, Eileen thought.

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  "I forgot to mention, by the way, that Tony's with Safe, Loft and Truck."

  He kept going down the line, Detective/Third Grade Daniel Riley of the Nine-Four, Detective/Second Grade Henry Materasso - had no trouble pronouncing that one - of the Two-Seven, and last but not least Detective/Second Grade Eileen Burke . . .

  "Eileen is with Special Forces." *

  Martha Halsted looked her over.

  "I'm not sure whether Dr Goodman ..."

  "Mike'll do," Goodman said, and smiled.

  "I'm not sure whether Mike" - a smile, a nod - "explained during the interviews that while you're attached to the hostage unit, you'll continue in your regular police duties ..."

  Oh, terrific, Eileen thought.

  ". . . but you'll be on call here twenty-four hours a day. As I'm sure you know, hostage situations come up when we least expect them. Our first task is to get there fast before anyone gets hurt. And once we're on the scene, our job is to make sure that nobody gets hurt. That means nobody. Not the hostages and not the hostage-takers, either."

  "How about us, Inspector?"

  This from Henry Materasso of the Two-Seven. Big guy with wide shoulders, a barrel chest, and fiery red hair. Not red like Eileen's, which had a burnished-bronze look, but red as in carrot top. The butt of a high-caliber service revolver was showing in a shoulder holster under his sports jacket. Eileen always felt a shoulder holster spelled macho. She was willing to bet Materasso had been called "Red" from the day he first went outside to play with the other kids. Red Materasso. The Red Mattress. And the class clown.

  Everyone laughed.

  Including Brady, who said, "It goes without saying that we don't want to get hurt, either."

  The laughter subsided. Materasso looked pleased. Martha Halsted looked as if nothing pleased her. Poker up her ass, no doubt. Eileen wondered how many armed cowboys she'd

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  blown away in her career at Robbery. She wondered, too, what Detective/First Grade Martha Halsted was doing here, where the job was to make sure nobody got hurt. And she also wondered what she herself was doing here. If this wasn't going to be a full-time job, if they could still put her on the street to be stalked and -

  "How often do these hostage situations come up, Inspector?"

  Halsted. Reading her mind. How often do these situations come up? How often will we be pulled off our regular jobs? Which in Eileen's case was strutting the streets waiting for a rapist or a murderer to attack her. Wonderful job, even if the pay wasn't so hot. So how often, Inspector? Will this be like delivering groceries part time for the local supermarket? Or do I get to work more regularly at something that doesn't involve rape or murder as a consequence of the line of duty?

  I don't want to kill anyone else, she thought.

  I don't want anybody to get hurt ever again.

  Especially me.

  So how often do I get a reprieve, Inspector?

  "We're not talking now about headline hostage situations," Brady said, "where a group of terrorists take over an embassy or an airplane or a ship or whatever. We're lucky we haven't had any of those in the United States - at least not yet. I'm talking about a situation that can occur once a week or once a month or once every six months, it's hard to give you an average. We seem to get more of them in the summer months, but all crime statistics go up during the summertime ..."

  "And when there's a full moon," Riley said.

  A wiry Irishman from the Nine-Four, as straight and as narrow and as hard-look
ing as a creosoted telephone pole. Thin-lipped mouth, straight black hair, deep blue eyes. Matching blue shirt. Tight blue jeans. Holster clipped to his belt on the left-hand side for a quick cross-body draw. Plant him and the dame from Robbery in the same dark alley and no thief in the world would dare venture into it. Eileen wondered how the people in this room had been chosen. Was compassion one of the deciding factors? If so, why Halsted and Riley -

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  who looked mean enough to pass for the Bonnie and Clyde of law enforcement?

  "That's statistically true, you know," Goodman said. "There are more crimes committed when the moon is full."

  "Tell us about it," Materasso said, grinning, and looked around for approval.

  Everyone laughed again.

  It occurred to Eileen that the only person in the room who hadn't said a word so far was Detective/Second Grade Eileen Burke. Of Special Forces.

  Well, Pellegrino hadn't said much, either.

  "This might be a good time to turn things over to Mike," Brady said.

  Goodman rose from where he was sitting, nodded, said, "Thanks, Inspector," and walked to the blackboard.

  Actually, it was a greenboard. Made of some kind of plastic material that definitely wasn't slate. Eileen wondered if the movie she's seen on late-night television last week would have made it as Greenboard Jungle. She also wondered why everyone in the room was on a first-name basis except Deputy Inspector William Cullen Brady, who so far wasn't either William or Cullen or Bill or Cully but was simply and respectfully Inspector, which all deputy inspectors in the police department were called informally.

  Goodman picked up a piece of chalk.

  "I'd like to start with the various types of hostage-takers we can expect to encounter," he said.

  His eyes met Eileen's.

  "Inspector Brady has already mentioned ..."

  Or was she mistaken?

  "... terrorists, the political zealots who are the most commonly known of all takers," Goodman said, and chalked the word onto the board:

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  "But there are two other types of takers we'll . . . let's get used to that shorthand, shall we?" he said, and chalked another word onto the board:

  "The takers we'll most frequently encounter ..."

  No, she wasn't mistaken.

  ". . . can be separated into three categories. First, as we've seen, we have the terrorist. Next, we have the criminal caught in the ..."

  He rode in the limo with the three women dressed in black. Sat between his mother and his wife, his sister on the jump seat in front of them, everyone silent as the big car nosed its way through the Thursday morning heat and humidity, moving slowly in convoy toward the cemetery where Aunt Katie was buried. His father was in the hearse ahead. He had talked to his father on the telephone only last week. It occurred to him that he would never talk to his father again.

  Teddy took his hand.

  He nodded.

  Beside him, his mother was weeping into a small handkerchief edged with lace. His sister, Angela, stared woodenly through the window, gazing blankly at the sunlit landscape moving past outside the car.

  It was too hot to be wearing black.

  They stood in the hot sun while the priest said the words of farewell to a man who had taught Carella the precepts of truth and honor he had followed all his life. The coffin was shiny and black, it reflected the sun, threw back the sun in dazzling bursts of light.

  It was over too soon.

  They were lowering the coffin into the ground. He almost reached out to touch it. And then his father was gone. Gone

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  from sight. Into the ground. And they moved away from the grave. His arm around his mother. A widow now. Louisa Carella. A widow. Behind them, the gravediggers were already shoveling earth onto the coffin. He could hear the earth thudding onto the hot, shiny metal. He hoped his mother would not hear the earth hitting the coffin, covering his father.

  He left his mother for a moment, and walked up the grassy knoll to where the priest was standing with Angela and Teddy. Angela was telling the priest how beautiful the eulogy had been. Teddy was watching her lips, reading them, eyes intent. They stood side by side in black in the sun, both of them dark-haired and dark-eyed - he wondered suddenly if that was why he'd chosen Teddy Franklin as his wife all those years ago.

  Angela was in her early thirties now, enormously pregnant and imminently parturient with her second child. She still wore her brown hair long, cascading straight down on either side of eyes surprisingly Oriental in a high-cheekboned face. The face was a refinement of Carella's, pretty with an exotic tint that spoke of Arabian visits to the island of Sicily in the far-distant past.

  Teddy was a far more beautiful woman, taller than her sister-in-law, her midnight-black hair worn in a wedge, intelligence flashing in her dark eyes as she turned now to study the priest's mouth, translating the articulation of his lips into words that filled the silence of her world: Teddy Carella was deaf; nor had she ever spoken a word in her life.

  Carella joined them, thanked the priest for a lovely service, although secretly - and he would never tell this to a soul, not even Teddy - he'd felt that the priest's words could have applied to anyone, and not to the unique and wonderful man who'd been Antonio Giovanni Carella, so-named by an immigrant grandfather who'd never once realized that such names would never be in fashion in the good old US of A. Nevertheless, Carella invited the priest to join the family at the house, where there'd be something to eat and drink -

  "Well, thank you, no, Mr Carella," the priest said, "I must get back to the church, thank you anyway. And, once again,

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  be cheered by the knowledge that your father is now at peace in God's hands," he said, which caused Carella to wonder whether the priest had even the faintest inkling of how much at peace his father had been while he was still alive. To make his point clear, the priest took Carella's hand between both his own and pressed it, from God's hands to Father Gianelli's hands, so to speak, in direct lineage. Carella remained unimpressed.

  Teddy had noticed that her mother-in-law was now standing alone some ten yards or so down the knoll. She touched Carella on the arm, signed to him that she was going to join his mother, and left him there with the priest still sandwiching Carella's hand between his own, Angela looking on helplessly. Standing in black, her hands resting on her big belly, her back hurting like hell, she knew damn well that the priest's eulogy had been boilerplate. Fill in the blanks and the dead man could have been anyone. Except that it had been her father.

  "I must be on my way," the priest said, sounding like a vicar in an English novel. He made the sign of the cross on the air, blessing God only knew whom or what, picked up his black skirts, and went off toward where his sexton was standing beside the parish car.

  "He didn't know Papa at all," Angela said.

  Carella nodded.

  "You okay?" he asked.

  "Yes, fine " she said.

  The sexton*gunned the priest's car into life. Down the knoll, Teddy^as gently hugging Carella's mother, who was still crying into her handkerchief. The car moved off. On the lawn below, the two figures in black were etched in silhouette against the brilliant sky. On the knoll above, Carella stood with his sister.

  "I loved him a lot," she said.

  "Yes." ¦?-

  He felt inadequate.

  "We'd better get to the house," she said. "There'll be people."

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  "Have you heard from Tommy?" he asked.

  "No," she said, and turned suddenly away.

  He realized all at once that she was crying. Mistaking her tears as grief for his father, he started to say, "Honey, please, he wouldn't have wanted ..." and then saw that she was shaking her head, telling him wordlessly that he did not understand the tears, did not know why she was crying, stood there in black in pregnancy in utter misery, shaking her head helplessly in the unrelenting sunlight.

  "What is it?" he asked.

 
"Nothing."

  "You told me you thought he was still in California ..."

  Shaking her head.

  "You said he was trying to get back in time for the funeral ..."

  Still shaking her head, tears streaming down her face.

  "Angela, what is it?"

  "Nothing."

  "Is Tommy in California?"

  "I don't know."

  "What do you mean, you don't know? He's your husband, where is he?"

  "Steve, please ... I don't know."

  "Angela ..."

  "He's gone."

  "Gone? Gone where?" #

  "Gone. He left me, Steve. He walked out." %*

  "What are you saying?"

  "I'm saying my husband walked out on me."

  "No."

  "For Christ's sake, do you think I'm making this upV she said fiercely, and burst into fresh tears.

  He took her in his arms. He held her close, his pregnant sister in black, who too many years ago had been afraid to come out of her bedroom to join her future husband at the altar. She'd been wearing white that day, and he'd told her

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  she was going to be the prettiest bride the neighborhood had ever seen. And then he'd said . . .

  Oh Jesus, as if it were yesterday.

  He'd said . . .

  Angela, you have nothing to worry about. He loves you so much he's trembling. He loves you, honey. He's a good man. You chose well.

  His sister was trembling in his arms now.

  "Why?" he asked her.

  "I think he has someone else," she said.

  Carella held her at arm's length and looked into her face. She nodded. And nodded again. Her tears were gone now. She stood in bloated silhouette against the sky, her brother's hands clasping her shoulders.

  "How do you know?" he asked.

  "I just know."

  "Angela ..."

  "We have to get back to the house," she said. "Please, it'll be a sin."

  He had not heard that expression since he was a boy.

  "I'll talk to him," he said.

  "No, don't. Please."

  "You're my sister," he said.

  "Steve ..."

  "You're my sister," he said again. "And I love you."

  Their eyes met. Chinese eyes meeting Chinese eyes, dark brown and slanting downward, the Carella heritage clearly evident, brother and sister reaffirming blood ties as powerful as life itself. Angela nodded.